Site Statistics

Every visit to your site is recorded by the web server and then analysed by the Webalizer, a popular program that presents the logs as meaningful statistics. The Webalizer updates your statistics at least once per week and often more frequently.

Please take a look through my unofficial notes on what the statistics mean. If anything is still fuzzy then I will be happy to talk to you: call Ian on 01302 554988.

How to view your site's statistics

1. Type the URL stats.hotchilli.net into your browser's Address box or click here
2. Wait a moment for the login screen to appear
3. Type your web site's URL into the box and press Continue

Hotchilli groups your site's statistics by month. From the main screen you can see how many visits your site has had from month to month. (Only the last twelve months are displayed.)

What do these stats mean?

The graph will give you a rough visual indication of how busy your site has been over the year.

Pages

The light blue bar (pages) is an interesting number. This shows how many pages have been requested by all your visitors over a given time. (One page may include a number of other files such as graphics and stylesheets which is why the bright blue bar is larger.)

Visits

Visits (which is the yellow bar on the mini-graph and listed in the table below) is the most important value; it roughly corresponds to the number of people who have visited your site.

For example, if Alice finds your site in the morning, looks through three pages and goes away again then comes back in the evening and looks at four more pages then her usage counts as two visits.

KBytes

KBytes is the amount of data that is passed from your site to all its visitors. This number is used by the designers who are performance tuning your site. Did you know you can have up to 2GB of data transfer per month? That is equivalent to about 50,000 page views on a typical site!

Files and Hits

These numbers are again more useful to your site's designers. Files is simply the number of individual files that your web site has sent out to people. (A single file stores data like a Word document or a photo like you might have on your own computer.)

Your web designer may change your web site's files from time to time, but for the most part they are the same. Because of this, it isn't necessary to keep sending the same file to your visitors if it hasn't changed since the last time they visited. Each request is recorded as a hit although a file is only counted if a file is sent from your web site to the user. (Remember that it does not need to be sent if it is already on your visitor's hard disk, that is, in their cache.) The green bar (hits) will always be bigger than the bright blue bar (files).

Finding out more

Click on one of the months. You will be taken to a page filled with many more statistics!

You already know about hits, files, pages, visits and KBytes.

Total Unique Sites

This is the number of different people who have visited your site. You may be wondering why there's so much jargon. That's because people aren't the only things to visit your site. Search engine spiders can also have a browse through your site.

Total Unique URLs

This is roughly the number of different files that have been requested. Your web site is made up of more files than you probably realise.

Total Unique Referrers

A referrer is a page that links to yours. It is often one of your own pages but can be a link from a search engine or an affiliate.